Presentation short abstract

By taking temporality as a frictional mode of governance in decarbonization policies, this paper argues that Europe’s green transition operates as chrono-colonialism—a temporal abstraction that erases and extracts place—and advocates for transformations rooted in place.

Presentation long abstract

Europe’s green transition is a future-oriented political project, projecting a linear accelerated path toward a greener future. This temporal regime—defined by urgency, measurable horizons, and the expectation of constant progress—is grounded in a modern, linear conception of time. The transition is therefore not only about which future is being built, but how life is temporally organised, and how time functions as a mode of governance. This paper examines how such dynamics unfold in Covas do Barroso, where Savannah Resources plans to develop Portugal's first “green mine.” For the past eight years, inhabitants have opposed the project, insisting that “green is Barroso.”

Drawing on a five-year collaboration with this struggle, a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork, and an embodied method of gardening-as-grounding, I conceptualize this clash of “greens” as a confrontation between divergent temporal regimes. The mining project's arrival has shattered local's sossego (peace and quiet), forcing slow rhythms to coexist with urgent and constant external demands. Its twelve-year lifespan is experienced as dispossession overwriting ancestral place-making practices. This accelerated temporality collides with the slower, cyclical rhythms through which inhabitants are-with their place.

I argue that decarbonization operates as chrono-colonialism: a temporal abstraction that empties and extracts place. The green future imagined by transition policies is abstract and placeless—a view from nowhere that erases situated forms of life. In Barroso, by contrast, seasonal practices, transmitted across generations, anchor people to place, entangling time with place. By showing how competing temporalities (un)make place, I argue for transformations rooted-in-place, beyond linear transitionism.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the use of law as a tool for land dispossession in South Saepmie, Norway, from the historical impacts of mining to contemporary contexts. It examines how dominant narratives have erased Saami temporalities and land use practices while also highlighting Saami counter-narratives.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the role of law as a strategic tool in the historical and contemporary struggles over land use and resource governance in South Saepmie, Norway. Using the case of Røros Copper Works and its impacts on Saami landscapes, exemplified through land conflicts over grazing rights around Femunden during the 19th and 20th centuries.

It explores how legal mechanisms have historically and systematically facilitated land dispossession and the marginalization of Saami landscape practices through the strategic use of law. The paper traces how these conflicts have unfolded over centuries, producing enduring inequalities between Saami communities and state or industrial actors, while drawing connections to contemporary mining industries and Norway's current mineral policy.

The analysis focuses on how dominant narratives of land dispossession shape perceptions of time and landscape practices. From colonial legal and scientific arguments that framed Saami reindeer herding as a primitive and subordinate practice to current “green transition” narratives, which prioritize industrial urgency as a more significant societal interest. Saami seasonal rhythms and intergenerational knowledge are silenced in favor of extractive logics and “sustainable” development, replicating historical patterns of epistemic and material violence.

Drawing on decolonial theories and Indigenous perspectives, this paper highlights Saami resistance that challenge the erasure of Saami knowledge and presence. By situating the historical continuity of lawfare within the broader context of extractive temporalities and Indigenous resistance, the paper seeks to illuminate the enduring dynamics of resource exploitation in Saepmie, both past and present.

Presentation short abstract

Diverging green transition politics are causing temporal enclosures through processes of frontier making and territorializations at the boarder of Finland and Norway. Grounded on solidarity, local communities have found successful strategies of resistance towards these undesired and unjust futures.

Presentation long abstract

“Wind is the only scalable option for new power generation - delays result in a power deficit” states the Energy Transition Outlook to 2050 of Norway as it places the emphasis of wind power production in the region of Finnmark, northern Norway. Building a narrative of urgency and uncomfortable futures, a resource frontier that encloses alternative spatiotemporal visions for Finnmark is promoted. Simultaneously, on the other side of the border in Finland a political decision is made to not designate wind power in the indigenous Sámi homeland. The divergent politics of green transitions at the Finland-Norway border clashed in the case of the Davvi windpark that was to be constructed in Finnmark. Through alterations to the landscape of the area, livelihoods such as tourism and reindeer herding and the Sámi culture on both sides of the border would have been affected. Applying a temporal dimension to the processes of frontier and territorialization dynamics, our paper analyses the solidary resistance of local communities in Norway and Finland that led to the dismissal of the Davvi windpark. The rhetorics of Davvi erased the local past as it presented the area as an empty landscape to be harnessed in the name of intergenerational justice. These temporal enclosures and dispossession of the past, present and future advanced by green transitions made it impossible for the local youth to plan or anticipate meaningful futures for themselves. Using document analysis, netnography and fieldwork, we trace the counter-narratives of the Sámi youth to voice their desired futures.

Presentation short abstract

Norway justifies hydropower, oil, and new green extraction as future‐oriented necessity, marginalising alternative temporalities. This paper argues this reflects an integral logic to the "Nordic model of dispossession", in which redistributive welfare policies obscures extractive dependence.

Presentation long abstract

Nordic welfare capitalism is often presented as evidence that social protection and environmental responsibility can coexist within capitalist modernity. Yet the Norwegian case reveals how prosperity and welfare expansion have been underwritten by long-standing forms of extractive temporal externalisation—from the historical damming of Sámi rivers for hydropower to decades of offshore oil extraction, and now the forward-projecting promises of wind power and seabed mining framed as green necessity. These interventions are legitimated through narratives of urgency and intergenerational responsibility, framing extraction as a necessary sacrifice to secure the welfare state’s future. Such narratives collide with the seasonal and ancestral temporalities that shape Sámi land use and stewardship, casting Indigenous temporal frameworks as obstacles to progress or as temporally “out of sync” with national development.

This paper theorises this contradictory logic as integral to the "Nordic model of dispossession" — a configuration in which egalitarian welfare institutions are materially sustained by extractive relations that are obscured through ideological narratives of national progress, shared benefit, and responsible modernity. By examining how redistributive and predistributive strategies are mobilised to stabilise extractive relations rather than transform them, the project interrogates Nordic social-democratic ideology and Nordic exceptionalist imaginaries that present reform as both sufficient and inevitable for progressive social change. Attending to temporal conflict in Norway’s green transition highlights how time functions as a site of dispossession and resistance, shaping the horizons of repair and the political imagination of transformation.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how multilateral climate finance in Vanuatu governs climatic futures through temporal violence, revealing how delay, dependency, and donor-driven temporal regimes reproduce coloniality and foreclose Oceanic futures.

Presentation long abstract

The climate crisis is a lived reality in Vanuatu. Its impacts demand substantial resources for climate action. While multilateral climate finance is framed as a mechanism of justice - redirecting resources toward those most affected - its promise remains largely unmet. Access to climate finance remains limited, often framed through donor narratives of inadequate ‘capacity,’ and has been criticised in its reproduction of subordination, subjugation and dependencies.

This paper interrogates these dynamics through the lens of colonial temporality and temporal violence, as „the fractured process by which governing powers/elites attempt to colonize the past, present, and future by imposing temporal regimes’ (Adib & Emiljanowicz, 2019, p. 1222). Drawing on ethnographic research and project collaboration in Vanuatu between 2023 and 2025, I show how the multilateral climate finance regime not only distributes resources but also governs communities’ (climatic) futures through time.

Four interlinked temporalities emerge. First, discourses of alleged backwardness position ni-Vanuatu institutions as perpetually behind in financial modernity. Second, the violence of delay, whereby adapting to donor requirements detracts from urgently needed climate action. Third, the longue durée of climate violence reveals how current finance architectures reproduce deeper histories of inequality. Finally, Pasifika scholars and artists have drawn attention to a distinct temporal register: that of de-futuring (Jetn̄il-Kijiner, 2023; Teaiwa, 1994) to describe the systematic foreclosure of Indigenous and Oceanic futures under conditions of climate crisis, militarization, and extractivism. Together, these temporalities expose how green funds enact time as a crucial medium of control in the negotiation of (climatic) futures.

Presentation short abstract

This paper ethnographically explores Kenyan geothermal energy futures. From their training grounds in Iceland to their work places, Kenyan engineers are entangled between global demands for low-carbon energy, systemic constraints, and the ghostly presence of the local futures they set out to build.

Presentation long abstract

This paper ethnographically explores how Kenyan engineers are tormented by uncertain and competing energy futures. Trained in Iceland and working in Kenya’s geothermal fields, these engineers navigate landscapes shaped by both geologic activity and powerful imaginaries of the past and future. Bubbling mud pools and rising vapour have long been associated with ghostly presences, from trolls in Iceland to warrior spirits in Kenya’s Menengai Crater. Yet these haunted landscapes also represent modernity, as their subsurface heat promises stable, green electricity. As Europe turns to Africa for green hydrogen and other renewable energy solutions, geothermal exploitation becomes part of a global scramble for resources framed as climate action. Kenyan engineers are key actors in realising these energy futures. Inspired by Icelandic models, they return home highly motivated but often encounter stalled projects, bureaucratic barriers, and frustrations when their adapted ideas remain unrealized. Feeling haunted by their own sociotechnical visions, some take action in their spare time, pursuing their ideals by helping rural communities use geothermal heat directly. But what happens when the just futures the engineers imagine threaten to become yet another extractive reality? Like the landscapes they work in, engineers are haunted by spirits of the past and by imaginaries of the very futures they set out to build.

Presentation short abstract

A qualitative and comparative study of Lemvig (Denmark), Lismore (Australia) and Fairbourne (Wales) demonstrating how climate turbulence and flood risks generate temporal and territorial dispossessions, while accelerated adaption timelines undermine long-term rural futures.

Presentation long abstract

Many rural coastal communities are on the frontlines of climate change, where intensifying floods collide with longstanding experiences of marginalisation and uneven attention from the state. Through the concept of 'climate turbulence', this paper examines how recurrent flood risks fracture temporal horizons and reshape climate futures in three rural places: Lemvig (Denmark), Lismore (Australia) and Fairbourne (Wales).

In Fairbourne, the planned withdrawal of state protection in 2054 has transformed the village into a place with an official expiry date. Here, long-term uncertainty combines with limited local investment to produce a temporal dispossession in which residents are asked to adjust their lives to a future that no longer includes them. In Lismore, successive catastrophic floods disrupt the temporal continuity of everyday life, pushing people into recurring cycles of displacement, rebuilding and bureaucratic delay. Here, climate turbulence unsettles the capacity to plan ahead, as residents navigate a recovery process that is out of sync with the scale and frequency of the impacts they face. In Lemvig, a new climate protection wall still offers a narrative of safety and resilience, but obscure slower-moving vulnerabilities linked to long-term risks. Here, infrastructural fixes provide temporal reassurance while deferring political questions about future viability.

Across these sites, flooding operates as both a material and temporal mode of dispossession. Official timelines overwrite local rhythms, intergenerational attachments, and situated futures, thereby revealing how time itself becomes a political terrain upon which the green transition unevenly shapes whose futures remain secure.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the Piave controversy through its emerging conflicting spatiotemporal configurations, contrasting hydrocratic linear time with heterogeneous local temporalities in shaping hydraulic risk and future territorial imaginaries.

Presentation long abstract

This paper presents the results of my doctoral research on the recent environmental conflict surrounding the Piave River and the management of hydraulic risk through a proposed flood detention basin in the protected Grave di Ciano area. The aim is to explore the chronotope of the Piave by analysing the spatiotemporal configurations that structure the controversy. In a context marked by decades of environmental exploitation and bureaucratic inertia since the 1966 flood, the basin project has produced an unusual alliance between hydraulic governance and extractive interests, opposed mainly by small local actors with limited institutional voice. The chronotopic framework highlights how temporal forms are inseparable from their spatial co-extension, generating situated configurations that shape socio-material assemblages. This allows a direct comparison between two conflicting temporalities. On one side stands the hydrocratic temporality, which constructs a linear, homogenized time aligned with economic development and technocratic control, rendering the basin both necessary and inevitable. On the other side emerges a contesting temporality, rooted in local lived experience, ecological and geological knowledge, artistic-philosophical perspectives, and alternative river-renaturalization techniques, which foreground the river’s heterogeneous temporalities and complex ecologies. The paper reconstructs how these competing temporal orders manipulate and reorganize human–nonhuman associations and how power relations unfold through the production of knowledge and ignorance as chronotopic zones regulating access to territorial understanding. The resulting assemblage of convergent alternative temporalities redefines hydraulic risk beyond technocratic modernism, challenging linear development narratives and opening plural horizons for imagining the future of the Piave.

Presentation short abstract

I show how different actors mobilise divergent temporalities in the Environmental Impact Assessment for a proposed dam. While state actors use foreshortened timescales to obscure impacts and promote the dam, residents highlight impacts to seasonality, fish lifecycles, and livelihoods to resist it.

Presentation long abstract

Time is increasingly central to political ecology analyses of contests over proposed infrastructure development and struggles for socio-ecological justice. While scholars have shown how different actors narrow or broaden the spatial scale of impacts to obscure or highlight impacts during development processes, less work examines how temporality and temporal scale are mobilised. Drawing on empirical fieldwork, I examine the contested Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the long-proposed Yuam River water diversion project in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands of the Salween River Basin. I show how state actors and consultants deploy foreshortened timescales that overlook long-term and non-human temporalities to minimise project impacts. Salween residents and civil society actors draw on divergent temporalities to foreground overlooked impacts including disruptions to the timing and rhythms of seasonal water flows, and fish migration and lifecycles, as well as multi-generational impacts. Many residents emphasised the time that they had invested into caring for their land and homes, and that the project would negatively impact their seasonally-adapted livelihoods. These temporal impacts underpin residents’ opposition to the project and motivate resistance. Overall, this paper shows how differently-placed actors invoke divergent temporal frames to shape whose voices and which impacts count during EIA. Such debates over the temporal scale and scope of impacts matter because they shape development decision-making and outcomes. This paper addresses pertinent questions in political ecology about whose voices count in shaping the future of the river and riverine livelihoods in the Basin.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing on anarchist thought, I demonstrate how the linear temporalities underlying green transitions reproduce injustice through their outcome-oriented logic. Confronting temporal injustice requires repoliticizing time: not acceleration but plural rhythms; not deferred but present emancipation.

Presentation long abstract

Green transitions are increasingly criticized for reproducing extractivism, dispossession, and injustice, yet the temporal logics underlying these processes remain largely unexamined. Current transition debates operate within what may be called “chronos,” a linear, managerial temporality characterized by roadmaps, tipping points, and urgency narratives. Crisis discourse reinforces these "chronopolitics," turning the future into an object of governance rather than collectively lived temporal practices. Recent calls for "war economy" mobilization intensify this logic, imposing standardized rhythms and centralized control that deepen injustice, particularly for communities already experiencing "slow" (or not so slow) violence stemming from extractivist practices.

The paper argues that anarchist temporalities offer crucial insights for reimagining just transitions. Anarchist thinkers – from Goldman and Landauer to Graeber and the Zapatistas – reject deferred emancipation and the promise of justice "after the transition." Instead, they foreground prefiguration, mutual aid, reflexivity, and present-tense utopian practice as ways of inhabiting time otherwise. They privilege what may be called “kairos,” e.g. the lived, opportune moment of collective action, over teleological progression toward distant endpoints.

Confronting green extractivism requires not only material and epistemic change but also a repoliticization of time itself. The paper proposes that just transformation must be lived as plural, emergent present-tense rhythm rather than administered as a timeline of control, allowing space for joy, care, reflexivity, and the recognition that transformation is both process and practice, not merely outcome.